Slim - one of my two Milo cats.
The news that one of California's most popular animal rescue groups has been 'shut down' by another popular animal welfare agency, Marin Humane Society (that happens to have the animal control contract for Marin County and is therefore empowered to oversee other agencies in their jurisdiction) has caused shockwaves around the Bay Area and beyond.
No beating about the bush here. I have known Lynne who runs the Milo Foundation for 10 years, and I've seen Milo at its most extraordinary and I've seen it at its most compromised. I've spent many days at the Sanctuary outside Willits, and have had my heart broken by the situation there but on other days have had my hopes fulfilled by the unlimited generosity of the woman who started out as a breeder of purebred Aussies and after her eyes were opened to the cynicism of the breeding industry (of which she was a part) turned her considerable skills to saving as many of those discarded lives and haunted eyes staring out from a cold concrete kennel as she could. I met the very first dog she had rescued - he was called Trainwreck and he came from the then high kill Berkeley Animal Shelter.
The story of the successes and the failures of Milo are as large as the characters who gravitate to this animal rescue group which broke many molds, which built a 300 acre sanctuary where dogs and cats that had no other chance could go - for life if need be (including some who came from me), but which could not keep up with their own express train form of rescue; Lynne, with her sense of style and design created a 'brand name' as powerful as many better funded organisations and whose zesty lively, exuberant adoption days on 4th Street were like a favorite carnival coming to town.
Milo was and is the best and sometimes the worst of animal rescue. There's no other way to say it. The biggest heart, the widest arms, the most enthused and energised volunteers, the most determined leadership - never knew when to say 'enough'. And faced with the bottomless pit of need - where animals who were once the new prize possession are discarded like garbage dumped by the side of the freeway - Milo waded into this morass and came out dirty. Rescuing animals from some of the worst, most shameful taxpayer run shelters can be a nasty business. Disease is high in areas where vaccines are a rarity, there is distemper, parvo and virulent forms of flu, there are skin mites and ear mites and ringworm and parasites, and worms and strange clinical conditions, flea allergies that leave kittens anemic and on the verge of death, there are pups which have been stuffed into crates and need surgery for deformed legs. The list of human inflicted abuse and neglect is shocking and baffling. And the level of institutional carelessness and deception is even worse.
But Milo - heroic yet understaffed and underfunded - kept saying 'yes' and on varying occasions over the last few years, lost control of the situation. And Lynne and everyone else at Milo knows that I lost my emotional center two years ago when I watched a litter of six healthy pups get sick while they were in Milo's care and all but two died. They died painful deaths. And when I begged Milo to stop for a while, they did not. And it destroyed a part of me. As Milo moved to San Rafael after having to sell their Berkeley property, I didn't ask 'if' it would happen again, but 'when?'
I believe Milo's greatest mistake was in misunderstanding what people want from an animal rescue group. I truly think that most people want to 'adopt' rather than buy or breed, I believe that people want to be proud that theirs is a 'rescue' dog but they want that dog to be healthy and relatively well behaved. They don't want to see those who are going to die, they don't want to walk through the rivers of piss in shelters that stink of death. They want the 'rescue' to happen before - when Lynne walks through the kennels of pathetic animals and she has to choose who lives. When she leaves, those she leaves behind may be dead within hours.
People want to adopt a little furry companion that has been vaccinated, spayed or neutered, microchipped, treated for parasites, groomed, and the fearful look in their eyes replaced by a grin with a new dental treatment shining off those pearly whites. There's nothing wrong with that.
Milo's decisions to adopt out sometimes wildly unhealthy animals made 'rescuers' out of people who want to support the effort but do not want to go down onto the battlefield.
And don't misunderstand - every group, every one has these problems. It just comes down to numbers.
And the numbers of abandoned animals is rising as the economy takes a toll at the most fundamental levels - people losing jobs, housing, health care, having to choose between putting food on the table for their kids or filling the dogs bowl on the floor. And increasingly, as the cost of veterinary care skyrockets and low cost care is not available, the animals are flooding into the shelters in shocking conditions.
This is a dirty business and Milo has tried as best it can with a heart as big as a canyon to bring joy to people and life to animals whom we selfishly allow to be born and then dump when they become an inconvenience, or sick, or old, or don't match the carpet, or when the baby is born.
Accusations about Marin Humane closing down a 'competitor' and feeling the effects of Milo's adoption numbers may or may not have validity. But I feel considerable anger towards the Marin Humane Society who closed Milo's adoption center in San Rafael and confiscated 19 animals. What gave Cindy Machado who heads up the MHS, the right to accompany the American Humane Society when they did an investigative tour of the Milo Sanctuary in Mendocino County? What arrogance that MHS showed photographs of staffers treating Milo animals transferred from the San Rafael adoption centre as if they were animals from a puppy mill or fighting dog ring. Marin Humane exploits the suffering of people and animals and this is simply the latest self aggrandising act. Who can forget their photo ops on the tarmac of San Francisco airport as the first Katrina dogs were flown in under the glare of TV lights and dramatic late night arrivals? A gorgeous money raising gimmick, just as the Michael Vick dogs and the latest puppy mill busts form the basis for the next fundraising appeal.
Ultimately it is all about the money. We have a terribly broken system of animal sheltering in California. Anyone remember a searing series of exposes in the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago when newly elected Assmblyman Mark Leno swore we would see radical and fundamental change in the municipal publicly funded shelters of our state? Our system is riddled with waste, lack of cooperation between agencies, non profits out to stab each other in the back, brutality, excess, top heavy administrations, police run facilities where budgeting is done at the whim of a police chief and not an animal care professional. And where the animals - completely oblivious of the careers they are furthering and the money they are raising - pay the only price that really matters.
Time for change. Milo is flawed. But without their bravery, without the passion of their founder, without the blind selfless devotion of their volunteers, what we would be left with is the climate controlled cooler of the Marin Humane and that would be a shame.
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